Stylus be gone!

This is how I roll these days. In order to ensure I do my part to make our products better, I’ve decided to toss out my stylus and survive on using my finger. That way, i) I won’t get confused anymore which I should be using, and ii) I feel every little nuance of using the finger to operate my phone. things like smaller hit targets, super narrow scroll bars etc.

This will allow me to give accurate feedback to our development teams as they stabilize the new OS.

Frank : I do resets by taking out the battery 😉 at least we can do that. I’d say nowadays 90% of my use of the phone doesn’t require a stylus / fingernail. it comes into play when I have to go to settings. otherwise, it’s surprising how much I don’t need a stylus. The Keyboard certainly helps.

I’ve been on a Windows Mobile standard device for the past two weeks so I’m a bit distanced from how I used the stylus before. But between having a hardware keyboard and finger friendly apps on my TyTn II I don’t recall using the stylus for much.

Be it ever so unreasonable I actually became good at using the onscreen keyboard with my finger tips.

Had a Blue Angel (Siemens SX66), screen over 3 inches. I lost both my styluses and didn’t care, because I only use the phone one-handed with my thumb. That is, until I wanted to do a lot of handwriting recognition.. I really missed the stylus then.

I think the big problem started when all the phones started coming out with tiny 2.5 inch screens.. the TyTn, Tilt, etc were all the rage and I wondered how would I ever use these since I like one-handed use. The iPhone came out with a >3 inch screen and now everyone’s making big screen phones again (now without keyboards and d-pads). Sigh

I love Transcriber, so any thoughts of rolling without a stylus are heresy! Please tell me that future versions will retain handwriting recognition which, to my eyes anyway, remains the only sensible way to author content on a device as small as a phone. Even on the 2.8" screen of my XDA I can rattle off a lengthy piece of text far quicker than on a mobile keyboard (HTC Universal included).